American Intifada

The morning sky revealed nothing about the coming events of the day. High scattered clouds pierced by a glaring sun. White yellow surrounded by white blue. Birds sing their songs of aggression and territorial placement over the heads of the busy human throng each oblivious to the other. A young man stares through dark glasses at a singular object, also oblivious of the others in his sphere of existence. His conflicting thoughts and emotions churning inside like a tempest, all hidden by a veil of external complacency. The preferred exterior countenance in the present circumstances of social and political correctness. He thought about his loves and his losses, his past, his present, and, his seemingly hopeless future.

The object of his scrutiny glowed white in his vision, the hot white of a perfectly tuned flame. The edifice held his utmost contempt. Behind the gated, patrolled, and secured walls of what once was the peoples house, lived the object of his turmoil, the dreaded symbol of hate by all those who had fallen under the spell of the personified devil; The President of the United Socialist States of Amerika.

It had been ten years since that fateful day when the demon had declared a national emergency. Soon afterward came the dissolution of the representative government and the beginning of a tyrannical dictatorial nightmare that unmercifully squashed all dissent and revealed the true intent of the beast. The change had not happened over night, it happened slowly gradually over time. One executive order at time. Many small steps towards perceived security and then one large step for tyranny. The events that unfolded before the stunned populace afterward rivaled those of the communist take over of Eastern Europe during the aftermath of the Great War. Millions interned never to be seen again. Stories of mass burials in remote areas guarded by day and night. The mass media that went along with the devastation of personal freedoms was now completely under the control of the evil government it had helped bring to power.

Many of the colluding reporters where probably now residing in one of those mass graves, who says justice was not served in those cases. They where never seen again after the change. No one mourned the loss of those fools. Though many mourned the loss of themselves and their freedoms, so taken long for granted and now just a hopeful memory. The mourning, of course, was in private, inside ones’ own head. No public showing of dissatisfaction or unhappiness allowed, by executive order. Unhappy people where a threat to the status quo and they where dealt with quickly and harshly, but never in the light of day. Always at night they came, screams in the night then silence.

He could still hear the screams. They never seemed to go away. The screams of his neighbors, the wailing of his family as he hid in his secret place the night they came to his address. The screams of the ghosts flowed through his psyche like heavy water, ebbing and crashing against the shore of his thoughts. The searing pain of the past brought on more endorphin reactions in his tensile body.

Just then a young woman passed and looking his way triggered thoughts of another time when he was happy in the arms of his first love. Barley at the age of adult realization, he thought the promises of heaven had been sent to him here on earth through her body and her persona. But the forces of the devil had taken her in the dark of night, just as he was returning to bring her news of a possible escape from their harsh reality.

It was the time of his youth and new deal promises of intellectual and economic freedom. The populace held out hope for a final release from the tyranny of oppressive taxation and the struggle to make it from one payday to the next. Energetic with raw enthusiasm, each morning seemed to be a new lease on life and joy oozed from every part of his being. He found love and life to be complementary. The world seemed to be open to anyone with the gumption to try and succeed at any endeavor.

She had held the real light in his thoughts, out shining the very star around which they revolved on a cyclic rotational orbit. Although the starlight waxed and waned, her light did not. She lit up the darkness in his life and his soul. Never again did he think he would ever be in darkness as long as she desired to be part of his mundane life.

Then came the change!!

The moron masses in their sheepish stupidity elected into office the demon, he quickly appointed a cabinet of hard core socialists promising everything under the sun, government patriarchy from cradle to grave. The motto was “We know what is best for you so just sit back and take it easy” which in turn became the “Take it easy” campaign. Once this program was in full swing things were never the same again.

The demon managed to get the right wing element of society riled up and at first the indication of mass resistance declared marshal law and suspended the Constitution. The Congress was put out to pasture and became a weakling rubber stamp for all that the demon proposed.

The right wing elements where quickly hunted down and arrested for violating the state peace initiative which basically stated that any dissension was unlawful as it became a threat to the peace plan. All individual rights where taken away. The only rights any individual had was the right to be peaceful and law abiding no matter how heinous, terrible, or oppressive, the law. Attempts by anyone at any level of society to thwart the actions of the new government were quickly met with a disappearing act. The person or persons involved just suddenly vanished with no trace.

The moron media that had promoted this new government and its horrible leader was the first to feel the sting of their new master. All dissenting journalists mysteriously died in freak accidents or just vanished in the night like so many others. Media organizations where nationalized under the guise of providing wholesome and non-threatening or disturbing news and entertainment. Mass entertainment was strictly regulated and the entertainment industry nationalized under the new department of “Public Mental Health and Enlightenment”. All programming was geared towards accepting the new government and it’s tyranny. Peace and prosperity was the theme, subjugation was the intent!

The most onerous law passed was the Public Safety Reconciliation Act of 2001. Under this new law all firearms including BB guns and pellet rifles where banned and confiscated. Many firearms manufacturers where either put out of business or nationalized to provide weapons exclusively for the nationwide military police forces. (All civilian police forces had been disbanded under this act). The ban also included the private ownership of any weapons by these new law enforcement officers at every level of authority. The weapons ban prohibited the carrying of any kind knife or blade over one inch long. It prohibited the use or carrying of any sharp object for anything other than what it was intended as in the case of tools.

Virtually any object that could be used as weapon was banned from being carried on ones person, in or on any vehicle, or stored in any building for use as a weapon. Of course these determinations where completely up to the investigating authority on the spot. All that was necessary for one to be arrested was for an MP to think you are doing something wrong and off you went to their tribunals. Often the tribunals where never even consulted as the MP’s had almost judge, jury, and executioner privileges. The tribunals never questioned any of their officers’ actions unless the offender was a member of the Bureaucracies. All tribunals where held in public view except those for one their own, then it was in the utmost secrecy. No one ever knew if the transgressions of the state minion’s were ever punished. No public executions or punishments, all offenders found guilty just disappeared from existence, a prospect more terrifying than any public punishment. There was some dissension at first but those that openly spoke out singly or as groups, suddenly and mysteriously vanished.

All these things and more swirled around in the young mans head as he watched an MP patrol pass by in their armored vehicle. The sun glinting off the polished helmets and deadly armaments. The sound of the ponderous thundering six-wheeled vehicle sent vibrations under his feet. The same sounds and vibrations he had felt and heard those terrible nights when they came to take away his family and neighbors. The present situation horribly pitted neighbor against neighbor as the paranoid vainly tried to influence the MPs by snitching on the neighbor next door or down the street in order to draw attention away from themselves. More often it only ended up drawing undue attention to the snitch, the result, being hauled anyway as untrustworthy, a fault almost as deadly as assaulting an MP.

He painfully remembered the night his starlight, his love was extinguished. It happened during a raid on a suspected hideout of anti-government sympathizers while going to the corner market. The MP’s went in with murderous automatic fire and killed everyone in the vicinity with no regard for the innocent or bystanders. All the bodies where picked up and whisked off without any delay and the scene sanitized as if nothing had happened. His lover had been caught in the gunfire and never knew what hit her. Eyewitnesses, who saw the incident and survived by hiding, related the story to him later after he had gone through days of agony wondering what had happened to her. The official report was that government had been tracking an underground terrorist organization that threatened the peace and prosperity initiatives and whom where intent on over throwing the government of the demon and his cronies. They displayed weapons and explosives that where supposedly confiscated, yet surviving witnesses never saw anything like that being removed during or after the raid by the MP’s. The bodies where never seen again by anyone.

Attempts by relatives and friends to claim the bodies where met with interrogations and threats of further investigations if the relatives persisted in seeing or claiming the bodies. The word in the street was that the bodies where cremated immediately after the raid. This story replayed its self over and over across the nation as dissident groups were hunted down and murdered in the night. Anyone, any age was killed with impunity if they where witness to these horrible raids. The official line was that anyone in the vicinity was either a look out or sympathizer and basically deserved what they got for not being out of the area or reporting to the authorities their knowledge of the unlawful activities. A new public law stated that all organizations had to be sanctioned and monitored by the government or that group met with a similar fate.

Now he sat watching and waiting as the MP patrol rounded the corner, his instincts honed like a razor. Like a compressed spring his body waited to be released. As the vehicle turned the corner he leaped behind the short wall behind him and grabbed the shoulder fired rocket launcher carefully hidden in a wall recess. When the vehicle’s ass end was fully presented to him he fired the weapon and quickly ducked down. The resulting explosion ripped the armor of the vehicle like tissue paper and disgorged torn bodies out onto the pavement. The secondary explosion of the vehicle’s shells spewed the remainder over a one-block area. As he looked back over the wall to survey the destruction, hidden bystanders quickly rushed in grabbed what ever was not destroyed and of potential value especially weapons of any kind or shape. The black market value for these items was more than any citizen could resist, it was like picking up gold. The camera’s placed on every corner for public security reasons vainly swung back and forth trying to pick out participants but their lenses had been darkened minutes before the attack by collaborators of the resistance to which he now belonged.

Sirens began wailing, soon the whole area would be surrounded and saturated with jack booted government thugs ready to shoot anyone in sight. As quickly as the destruction occurred the streets where again silent and empty. Thomasino had creep back down into sewers to rendezvous with his cell team. Each cell had been given secret orders to carry out and no one knew the plans of the other cells or their identities. Each had successfully carried out their mission and would be miles away before the MP’s would begin their destructive search. Many innocents would lose their lives today but the blow stuck against government tyranny would ring out as a beacon to the rest of the country as surely and as the first shots fired by the British soldiers during the revolutionary war over 200 years before.